What evangelicals gain and lose doing business with the president.
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There is, though, one obvious piece of evidence from the president’s political career that suggests his dealmaking reputation might be deserved after all: the relationship he has with evangelical political leaders. He has lavished them with attention and let them bask in his celebrity star-power, things that they, long feeling like outsiders in American culture and politics, have badly craved. In exchange, they have thrown him their support—unconditional support, by all appearances—and with it, the backing of a political constituency vital to his success at the polls.
In The Faith of Donald J. Trump, authors David Brody and Scott Lamb provide an in-depth look at the relationship between the president and American evangelicals. Brody and Lamb—respectively a newscaster with Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network and a vice president at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University—have written what they dub a “spiritual biography,” even though they come right out and say they have no intention of answering the question of whether Trump is a Christian. Instead, they hope to convey his faith through his actions.
In the process, though, Brody and Lamb inadvertently expose the corruption and moral vacuity of the political evangelical movement in the United States.
Trump only started paying attention to evangelicals once he began to consider running for president—some five or more years before the 2016 campaign. He made a show of cozying up to evangelical pastors who write books that usually don’t sell well outside their own congregations. He reached out to the prosperity-gospel heretic Paula White and flattered her. He asked questions of other religious leaders.
As his ambitions grew, Trump cannily cultivated relationships with evangelicals, and they convinced themselves that those relationships must be sincere since they began before he openly started campaigning for the presidency. Once he did start openly campaigning, the outreach only became more intensive. As Brody and Lamb report, Trump would seek out the preachers to sit next to at events. He would bring his mother’s Bible to meetings to show it off. Evangelicals fell for it. So deluded and distracted are they by the trappings of power, they do not even see what Brody and Lamb see. “He’s the P. T. Barnum of the 21st century,” an anonymous banker in the book says of Donald Trump. These evangelical leaders have yet to realize that they are the suckers.
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More egregiously, in another passage the authors suggest that Trump’s rapacious libido is just his misguided quest for God. I wish I were kidding. The authors prominently quote a character from a 1944 Bruce Marshall novel: “I still prefer to believe that sex is a substitute for religion and that the young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God.” Brody and Lamb’s book was printed before the appearance of press reports about Trump having had sex with a porn star around the time his wife was giving birth to their son, but one gets the sense that the authors of The Faith of Donald Trump and the evangelical casuists they quote would have no trouble spinning that infidelity as something unimportant or, in a roundabout way, even admirable.
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So if Brody and Lamb don’t grapple seriously with Trump’s moral character and choose not to answer the question of whether or not Trump is a Christian, how do they fill their hundreds of pages?
The book is stuffed with supposition. At one point we are assured that if Andy Warhol were alive today, he’d watch The Apprentice. This comes one page after announcing how much Warhol hated Trump. “If young Donald Trump” did something or other is a recurring theme. If he had picked up a book on church history he would have discovered all sorts of things. “If Trump recalled his Old Testament Bible stories,” he would have clearly understood what he was talking about by referencing the promised land in a speech. If frogs had wings they wouldn’t bust their asses every time they jump. That’s not actually in the book, but I kept thinking about it when whole sections of the book were premised on if Trump did or read or saw something.
Much of the book is padded with descriptions of every conceivable Christian influence on Donald Trump, no matter how attenuated. Brody and Lamb make him out to be the heir of Martin Luther, John Knox, John Winthrop, John Witherspoon, and Billy Graham.
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This is perhaps the most ridiculous part of the book except for all the other parts. They introduce the chapter on Peale’s relationship with Trump by noting that Peale had been long forgotten until Trump ran for president and the relationship surfaced. They then try to claim Peale had no real influence on Trump while quoting Trump and others saying the opposite. Then they claim Peale really wasn’t as theologically liberal as he really was by the time Trump knew him. Then they attack evangelical critics for waiting until Trump ran for president to be vocal about the man they acknowledged had largely been forgotten until Trump ran.
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Brody and Lamb document all the conceivably Christian influences in Trump’s life—the histories of his churches and pastors, how much he watched Billy Graham on television with his dad, a description of the picture taken the day young Trump was confirmed into the church, and even how Trump carries around his mother’s Bible. But then they expose the evangelical political movement’s shallowness and lack of discernment by quoting Paula White at Trump’s inauguration: “[Trump] doesn’t know our ‘Christianese’ ”—the language of a regular, churched believer. This calls to mind James Dobson’s famous characterization (strangely, not quoted in the book) of Trump as a “baby Christian.” Trump is, you see, really new at this Jesus stuff. Except the authors just spent well over 100 pages copiously documenting the multitudinous interactions the man has had with the faith since his birth while apparently learning absolutely nothing.
What is missing from the book is what is necessary to really buy into the notion of Trump’s Christianity. There are stories of Trump praying with people. There are stories of his meetings with evangelical leaders and of him writing them large checks. But there are no stories of repentance. Trump famously said during the campaign that he has never asked God for forgiveness:
I am not sure I have. . . . Now, when I take—you know, when we go in church and when I drink my little wine, which is about the only wine I drink, and have my little cracker, I guess that is a form of asking for forgiveness. And I do that as often as possible, because I feel cleansed, OK?
True to form, Brody and Lamb praise Trump for this, casting it as an admirably candid moment. But a Christian is commanded to repent and accept Jesus as his Lord and savior. Donald Trump never has. There are plenty of people who attest to his faith. But no one has a story of Trump publicly or privately acknowledging he is a sinner in need of saving. The best they can do is let Paula White take Jesus out of context about casting stones.
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You should know that I read The Faith of Donald J. Trump in the English version and can only guess at what was lost in the translation from the original North Korean. Donald Trump has, it is clear from this book, become Dear Leader, Generalissimo, Eternal General Secretary, Eternal Chairman, and Eternal Leader of the People’s Evangelical Party of America. The Soviets, Chinese, and North Koreans would find it very familiar.
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In the end, Brody and Lamb’s book exposes how the leaders of the evangelical movement, long treated as outcasts from mainstream culture because of the charlatans in their midst, now enjoy an utterly transactional relationship with Donald Trump, each using the other for an end they believe justifies the means. The long-term damage to the American evangelical movement, which has spent decades working toward respectability and intellectual seriousness, remains to be seen. And a president in need of a savior is surrounded by men and women of faith who are more interested in doing business with him than calling him to repent so that his eternal soul might be saved.
But Gorsuch!
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In light of the latest revelation about an affair with a playboy model, please take a moment to read my review of The Faith of Donald Trump, a new book by evangelicals pretending Trump is something he is not. https://t.co/Xlein4tuDg
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) February 16, 2018
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